Priorities
by HVK
Summary: John Winchester sometimes felt that the hunting was payback for the family life he lost. At the end, he feels differently about what's important to him.


Right, all; this started as a present to my mom, who is a rabid Supernatural fan, with a particular liking for John Winchester. Me, I'm more of a Castiel fan, but that's not important. I decided that this was mildly well-written enough to be posted, so here you go, along with a short drabble afterwards.

Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural or any properties, characters and settings thereof.

* * *

In the begining when his obsession started, before he had the presence of mind to think the _why_ of it all, John never thought too much about it, but eventually he supposed that the hunting was vengeance for the normal life he never got to have.

A pleasant house in the suburbs that wasn't a burned wreck. A job that didn't mean that people would die if you screwed up or kept you away from your family most of the time. A wife that you could rely on instead of a memory that you begun to suspect was at least half made of the fantasies and suger-coated hopes you attached. And two sons who weren't so far down the Road of Screwed-Up that you had a horrible feeling they were going to do the same exact thing you always did, with the same consquences.

When the demon killed his wife and placed the seeds of demon-taint in his son's blood, things fell apart faster than a bowling ball dropped on a playing-card house.

Every monster he killed was like a blow for that life. Banish that ghost, because you'll never see your sons graduate from college because one had to be pulled out and the other left so he could finish school. Exorcise this demon, so you can hope that you're doing the same to the one that started it all some day down the road. It became routine after a while, and he never really realized why he was doing it for a long time. Self-reflection was a luxury he didn't allow himself.

Not until Sam left.

Sam's refusal to stay shattered his comfortable illusion that he had found some vauge semblence of a life; he and his family were in a war fought by monster-killers, and his boys were his soldiers. But soldiers, like the ones he thought his boys were, don't desert. But a son, dissatisfied with his lot in life, can leave.

It had been a slap to the face, throwing his mistakes back to the forefront, and he had made another. He would stay up late often later, hating himself so badly for it that he wished he could rip a hole in time and go back and make himself do it right, and couldn't think of anything else besides the fact that he had told his son, his own _son, _that he left that door he couldn't ever come back.

In some ways, he was bothered by the idea that he had crushed Dean's spirit in some way, made him incapable of leaving on his own. If anything, Dean was even more hung up on the idea of them as a family than he was, and more obsessed with keeping it together. When Sam left, it hurt Dean just as bad. But it got John to thinking. He came to the conclusion that he couldn't kill the yellow-eyed demon like this, couldn't keep Dean bound up in his obsessive fantasy of a family that hadn't been a family for a long time.

So he left. That was worse for Dean, John was perfectly aware, but he did it the same way he'd always done the harsh things he'd done in life; gritting his teeth, hoisting the weight on his back and living with it so his sons wouldn't have to.

Years would pass. He didn't answer the calls Dean left him and he heard _nothing _from Sam. He liked to think that it was because Sam didn't need him anymore, but was afraid that Sam didn't think of him as a father, but as an...obstacle or something. Like water in the dry season, the concept of family dried out, and what was left was cracked and painful. He thought of them as _tools_, not his children but useful resources he was waiting to draw upon, just in case.

Later, when he had better clarity, he would despise himself for the heartless thing he had allowed himself to become because of his obsession.

Then, as things do, they changed. The situation required that his sons help him, and things rapidly evolved from there. He shouted his childish accusations, even as he knew perfectly well the horrible father he had become, the wall between himself and his children, the same iron-shod wall he put up between everyone he knew. Pushing them away or protecting himself from heartbreak, the wall served either purpose adequately.

But life wasn't simple. Sam and Dean broke the wall, probably without meaning to, and he admitted to them what he had become; not a father but a harsh parody of one. A drill sergeant, like he told Dean.

Again, a shift took place. The obsession wavered; it was still there, but the well-being of his children seemed more important. The happiness and lives of Sam and Dean became a bigger priority than killing the demon, in spite (or perhaps because of) the sacrifices they went through, the struggle of finding out everything about the demon and looking for the Colt, a gun John had once heard a man named Constantine refer to as the 'Ace of Winchesters'.

And it was almost like a home again. Constantly on the move, restless and mere steps from death, but a warmth that he hadn't know since before Mary died.

Once something like that happened, John knew, there was no going back. Pretending you could was worse than childishness, it was flagrant stupidity. He knew he was better than that.

The only question was how far he carry it.

-----

In time, the question becomes redundant.

Faced with a choice of ending the obession or saving Dean from wasting away in a coma, the answer becomes quietly evident. He has the Colt, he has the oppertunity, he can finally give Mary's memory peace for once and for all...but that doesn't seem as important anymore. It's a fly, buzzing in the back of his mind and wrestling for attention from the bigger issue.

So when he makes the deal and gives away all possibility for an easy solution to the demon for himself, it's a strange fact that he doesn't feel bitter about it, but content.

Years of hunting monsters, spirits and stranger things made him feel more human at first, drove away the anger and regret that haunted him like barnacles on a ship, but over time it became routine. In contrast, he feels like he's won in some strange way.

John knows that he will die. Not distantly, as everyone feels at some point. But soon. _Very _soon.

He feels that he can die with a smile on his face. Sam and Dean can do it. He knows they can; it's a strange presentiment with no apparent basis in fact, but he feels it as clearly as though the idea was written in the sky in lines of red fire. He also knows what's coming, the torments that await, but it's coupled with a grim expectation.

How many demons had he dealt with? Well, what would be a few more?

He's kidding himself, but he doesn't much care anymore. The important things are taken care of. Sam and Dean are alive, and that's all he's concerned with.

He can't help but smile, even as the tears roll down his cheeks. It's a pity he has to die now, when he's come to understand the truth about what he should have down, but he refused to dwell on ideas now.

John wished, briefly, that Bobby could know about this turn. He might accept it and let him back into the fold, or more likely, hit him in the back of the head for being an idiot for so long. Regardless, Bobby can take care of them; he's done it for long enough. It's a bitter thought, but Bobby had become a better father to Sam and Dean than he ever had.

So he accepts it. _Let come what may_. In the back of his mind, there's a grim satisfaction that he's sticking his finger in the eye of the demon; he doesn't like thinking about it, but it seems that Sam and Dean are his trump cards after all; they will be the death of the demon. It's like a premonition from Heaven.

At the thoughts of Heaven, John vaugely wondered if there were angels, without self-pity or anger.

In a strange way, he reflected, it was like winning. At the end of things, he had come to let go of the transient things (obsessions and bygone memories) and give it all up for the things that _did _matter. There was regret. Dean was not going to handle this well, and he trusted Sam to be there to help his brother.

John quietly waited to pay his due, enjoying his last moments with his sons. It bore repeating. He had lost, but only in the most pointless sense; he had won, because Sam and Dean were alive and well.

It wasn't a normal life, and it was soon to be over, but for an moment, things were _right_.

_----end----_

* * *

_And just in case that was too depressing for you all, here's an exerpt from a drabble that didn't go anywhere, set in a fantasy anachroism stew! Think a mixture of Exalted and Discworld. With a hint of Fullmetal Alchemist and One Piece. Enjoy!_

For as long as he'd been doing the job no one wanted to admit was needed, John Winchester had a small but brutally clear rule set. It wasn't anything as grand as a knight's code of honor or idealistic as any Crossguard paladin's, but more simply a 'do not do if you like being alive' law. Before she died, his wife had passed them down to him from her father, and he had done his part to make his boys learn.

John knew that sometimes rules had to be broken, but he still felt like a complete idiot for ignoring one of the top rules; _never do ANYTHING in the middle of the night_. There were..._things _that lived at the hour, that danced and fed and killed then. Do it in the daylight, said his mental checklist. Do your job in the early morning or even close to dusk, but _don't _do anything when you could see the moon and not the sun.

Hunters who tried pulling that kind of thing had a tendency to not stay Hunters for very long and instead be reduced to organic fertilizer. John was a _very _good Hunter, had been for a long time, and he hoped that his boys would do the same. (_Of course, knowing them, _chided a small sarcastic voice at the back of his mind that sounded too much like Castiel in his more sour moments. _They'll end up making things worse for each other in an escalating series of painfully obnoxious attempts to fix their own messes._ He resented how accurate it seemed.)

There was a small trace of exoneration; there was no evidence of horrors beyond the ken of normal people. Their current position, an island in a particularly large archepelago, was the sort of place that might have well have had 'Come Get Me!' in bright neon letters hovering over it, espicially to a certain case of political mind; John didn't know why and didn't particularily care. For all he knew, it might have been for the potential as a base of trade with the island nations futher to the west, or more likely as a place to establish a harbor base.

For the last hour or so, he and his boys had been peripherally aware of a large and brutal battle being fought a considerable distance away from them; for battlefields, massive ships that flew across the water rather than floating atop it, bristling with cannons and energy-discharge weaponry, and for fighters, impossibly tough combatants who could bisect buildings with a single cut or shrug off attacks that shouldn't have even been physically possible to be hit by and _still be in one piece_. Things like that were none of their business, and they had tried to weave their way towards the center of the island through a dense rain forest, hoping that no stray blasts came their way or fighters accidentally get launched to their postion and start fighting immediately without a care for the collateral damage.

It had cooled down some time ago, following a massive blast of, what, he didn't know, but had looked like a massive blast of light that had incinerated at least three of the ships and somehow vaporized almost everything in range. He counted himself lucky to have avoided a fight like that; outside of a incarnate angel, he had no idea what sort of thing could pull off something like that.

Less lucky now; he had gotten lost, turned at the wrong lake or went right around a tree he already passed, and they had come right around to the beach again.

"I hate everything green," His older son, Dean, said sulkily. "Okay? Is that in the open now? Because I frickin' hate _everything_ that grows! Nothin' but trouble."

John's younger son, Sam, raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure you're not just projecting? Self-loathing isn't healthy."

Dean blinked. A beat. "...Hey! Real mature!" He gestured at John pleadingly. "You heard that! Help me out, I'm calling on firstborn rights!"

"Sam," John said, not skipping a beat while he employed a wickedly sharp whalebone machete to cut through the jungle undergrowth; he'd bought it from a sarcastic but rather ingenious boy he'd met during a brief trek with a roaming tribe of natives near the Far South. At the time, he had been hunting what he thought had been a wendigo, but had wound up being a particularily degenerate werewolf. Fortunately, lycanthropy ran in the blood of that particular tribe and they'd volunteered to give him back-up owing to a few favors they owed him; John collected favors the way his older son collected girlfriends. "You wouldn't shoot fish in a barrel. You wouldn't push an imp into holy water. So don't insult Dean like that, it's not sporting."

Sam chuckled. Dean sputtered incoherently before settling for a stubborn muttering. "It's a conspiracy. All you are in on it."

The cuttings at their feet shifted, as though stirred by the beats of immense wings. _I'm not_, said a voice that none of them were entirely sure was actually there.

"You don't count. You have to exist to be in it. So you don't. But if you did, you would be. And you don't, so you can't."

John stopped in mid-swing to stare at Dean dubiously. "Dean, you're talking to yourself again."

"What?! No I'm not."

"Yeah, you are," Sam said. "It's kind of creepy."

"Am not!" Dean gesticulated at thin air. "C'mon, Cas, back me up!"

The invisible presence did not obligate him in any apparent way.

There was a long, awkward pause. "Dean," John said in a gentler voice than he usually employed for his sons. "We've talked about this. I'd thought that you promised that you wouldn't talk back to things that weren't actually there after that business with the savage imaginary friends."

"It wasn't that bad," Dean said.

Sam shuddered. "Speak for yourself. I still have nightmares about the Jabberwock." Dean glanced at him, smirking deviously. Sam glared. "Don't you even think about it."

"Uffish."

"Hey, I said not to!"

"Frumious bandersnatch."

"Stop it!"

"Maxome foe."

"Dean, I said stop!"

"Tumtum tree. And vorpal, even though that sounds pretty badass."

"I said, stop!"

"The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame/came whiffling through the tulgey wood/and burbled as it came!"

"Okay, now you're quoting the source material! Did you memorize the whole thing just to annoy me?!"

"Yes."

John rolled his eyes but ignored them. It was really better just to let them bicker like idiots in the long run.


End file.
